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Friday, August 9, 2013

There's a reason why I own so many Bundt pans - it's because my cake decorating skills are nonexistent. I have pastry bags and tips and I know how they're supposed to be used, but I'm not really good at it. I'm really good at sprinkling powdered sugar, though.

But there are times when even I feel a need to do some more complicated cake or cookie decorating. So a tool that's geared for the less-skilled decorators is right in my wheelhouse.

I gave the DecoMax ($24.99) from Lekue a test drive with a vast number of cookies and some royal icing.

The first thing I liked was the wide opening that made it easy to fill. The other great thing was that I could take off the tip and put on a cover and store the icing for use the next day. And the last great thing was that it's completely dishwasher safe.

The not-so-great thing is that there aren't a huge number of tips - there are three sizes of plain tips and three sizes of star tips. But if you're using something like this, you're probably not concerned about doing complicated decorating.

The shape of this thing is completely different from holding a piping bag or even a squeeze bottle, but that's not a bad thing. I could use it with one hand or two, depending on what I was doing. I think it would be great for kids or for anyone who needs the two-handed grip for stability.

Did this improve my decorating skills? Not really. But it was a a lot neater than my usual attempts.

If you're adept at using a pastry bag, there's no need to add this to your gadget collection, but if you need a simple tool for yourself or for kids, this has some useful features.The product was supplied for the purpose of a review on Serious Eats; this was previously published on Serious Eats.

Cookbook author and food writer for Serious Eats, Whisk Magazine, and the Left Hand Valley Courier, among others. Columnist at American Recycler. Blogger at www.cookistry.com and reviews.cookistry.com.

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